Trust & Distrust

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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TRUST

One of the key dynamics of human social interaction is the polarity between trust and distrust.

Trusting in another is having faith in them. Having faith in another person is always a leap of faith. We must act as if we know the result when the result is still unknown. We jump into the void of the unknown and hope that something is going to catch us.

Trusting another people means deliberately allowing yourself to be vulnerable with them. It means leaving yourself open to potential danger. If the person you trust is actually trustworthy then you are safe in trusting them, while placing trust in the wrong person can result in terrible harm. Being able to trust people is always important. That is part of why betrayal and its national counterpart treason are both regarded as such grievous and serious offenses.

Everyone has a drive to survive. In our survival efforts we often seek to limit our vulnerability. Yet invulnerability, as desirable as it might first appear, is mostly a fiction. It exists primarily in the imagination. We are almost always vulnerable to somebody. True invulnerability would make us something other than human, completely insensitive and locked away from others. Almost every interaction with another person involves some degree of risk. In good cases this risk will be worth it.

Now if you have taken the leap of faith, fallen down and gotten hurt then the practice of distrust becomes an act of self-preservation. If this happens enough then you just stop hoping for the best and simply anticipate the worst. Betrayal leaves deep scars. Trust and mistrust are subject to the force of habit and once we learn to do one more often it can be a difficult habit to break.

Distrust can be used as survival tool. People for whom mistrust is a habit have often been forced to survive many hostile situations. The drive to survive is powerful. We do live in a dangerous and deadly environment. Placing your trust in the wrong person can result in death, or even worse. Selective trust is important. This is especially true now when the most dangerous thing in our everyday environment is other people.

Distrust keeps us in a heightened state of awareness. Because everything is an exchange the cost of this heightened state of awareness is anxiety, tension and stress. The body can only maintain this state for so long before suffering burnout. Having few people whom you can trust will have many painful consequences.

The act of trusting a genuinely trustworthy person is highly beneficial. Firstly we can release all the stress and anxiety from hyper-attentiveness. Trustworthy people can work with us in teams to accomplish goals that we could never accomplish alone. They people can also take care of tasks for us that we are unable to perform them. We can share with them and know that whatever we share with them will be respected.

Developing trust is of vital emotional importance. We can only mature as emotional beings by connecting with other emotional being. We can only be connected in genuine relationships by first trusting other people.

So we are stuck with the delicious and deadly dilemma of deciding whom we can and cannot trust. Unfortunately we are limited in our ability to discern who is trustworthy and who isn’t. We live in an era that leans towards distrust. Trust is difficult to build and easy to destroy. One act can diminish a person’s trustworthiness, while it may take fifty deeds to develop it. A person with the right skills can easily exploit this limited ability. Con artists and other manipulators are experts at sending us effective signals that indicate their trustworthiness. Our lack of experience with trusting other people makes us less resistant to these manipulations.

Why not employ universal skepticism and simple distrust everyone? This is a potential solution, but it is not without significant cost. Maintaining constant distrust is exhaustive. It also interferes with achieving goals. There is little we can do that does not involve trusting at least one other person. The biggest setback of all is the lack of emotional growth and the high unlikelihood of ever feeling safe or secure in your life.

An imbalance in our practice of trusting other people is disadvantageous. The extreme distrust of other people becomes paranoia. You are a nut, a whacko, a madman, and a freak. The extreme trust of other people becomes credulity. You are a sap, a sucker, a dupe, a mark, and a rube. As in all practices, moderation tends to serve us best.

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Xanderman, I agree that trust is difficult to build and easy to destroy. When someone breaks your trust, depending on the severity, sometimes it can never be reestablished. If your mate cheats on you- I think it’s pretty much a deal breaker. If they did it once, they will do it again kind of thing. Sometimes the constant breech of trust of many people combined can make a person bitter and untrustworthy themselves. What better way to protect yourself from having to trust other people, than to just be untrustworthy yourself? It balances the playing field in a way.

Yes, trust does make you vulnerable and moderation is the key. Keeping the “emotional wall” up is imperative- love has a lot to do with trust, perhaps more to do with you as an individual than the other person because so much of the emotion is about you and your fear. The intensity of love is fear, the fear of someone burrowing inside, knowing too much and taking advantage of you and your generosity. The fear of the love becoming unrequited which you know, after you’ve stepped over the final threshold and it’s too late to turn back, will only make the love stronger. It’s a game of trust.

Personally, I find it more comfortable not to trust people. Placing any trust beyond a very basic trust in someone is a recipe for anxiety. It’s about expectation too. I’ve always believed that expectations are dangerous things, unless you’re always anticipating the worst- in which case your wearing the most effective armor (it is self preservation). There is also always misinterpretation and chance which can obscure a sense of trust.

I don’t think you can ever trust anyone fully. I don’t think you can ever fully trust yourself. How can someone prove themselves “genuinely trustworthy” when there is always the chance that they will be dishonest? I guess you would have to trust them to find out - see that’s what makes me nervous. I’m probably paranoid.

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for me, trust doesn’t mean anything, since it represents a kind of faithism, which is one of the things that pure reason works against.

i believe the relationship of people is fundamentally built on mutual satisfaction. while the word “deal” might sound a bit cruel, “trust” could sound stupid. a lot of things represent deals somehow. i wrote a poem called “lovers’ deal” (lost it somewhere in cyber space), in which i tried to explore the givings and recievings of both sides. i concluded: love is likely to be put to an end, if some of the “deals” (if not any), is broken. no matter how “holly”, “crazy” plus “promising” the love originally seems, it will go burst. e.g. a 50 year old man divorces his 60 year old wife because she no longer functions well in bed. this might sound a sad reason to end such a long marrige, but once thought about what the marrige is actually based on, then it’s a no-surprise. but still, you could consider it sad, only if you consider human nature as pathetic.

friendship is too based on “deals”. the difference is the nature of the deals obviously. the implication is: some reasons for divorces can’t act as reasons for breakups. the above example is the obvious one. there are more subtle cases though. i’m interested in analysing the causes for relationship endings, via the way in which treating the relationship as a deal. so far this way, i’ve been able to present exact acceptable causes. so i consider myself trouble-free from relationships. only trouble-free in the understanding sense though.

this is a bit of a run-off… xandermoon, i agree with most of your staff on this topic, but this particular one:

“So we are stuck with the delicious and deadly dilemma of deciding whom we can and cannot trust. Unfortunately we are limited in our ability to discern who is trustworthy and who isn’t… Our lack of experience with trusting other people makes us less resistant to these manipulations.”

i don’t think we are actually stuck in such a delimma in practical terms. i mean, who completely shut off their reasoning after deciding to trust? a few of us have a suspicion capacity zero, it’s a question of how suspicius/causcious we are. and i’m sure the last sentence of the paragrah needs more explaination, otherwise it’s sounding quite contradictory to me.

vortical, “Personally, I find it more comfortable not to trust people.”… as i explained above, i think it’s unnesseccary for you to look at the matter in such a rigidly strict way. knowledge is power; reason is the way! i know i just promoted intuition, which trust might seem to belong, but in fact i reckon, trust is arised from the primitive kind of “quick logic” - it’s based on reason with impureness and bias.

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Yes, I agree that love relationships and friendships are “deals” in that once you cease to get what you desire from them, you will allow them to end. You expect certain people to fill certain rolls in your life, and like the married couple example you gave, if that person no longer fills the requirement you have placed upon them the deal is broken. This is by no means true in all cases. Some men may not place so much importance on one aspect that they are willing to throw everything else away over it. Even if you love your spouse, believe in your marriage vows wholeheartedly, can you “trust” that their feelings or your feelings will never change? Is this even trust or it is something else?

Pureasonist, I think relationships end and deals are broken when the negative outweighs the positive. When the threshold of patience has been breached completely and there is no further desire to compromise or understand.

That I have found it easier not to trust is not a conscious decision, it’s the result of past instances of distrust and a lack of trust in myself perhaps.

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vortical, perhaps you’d like to explain more about the “negative outwieght positive”.

and, why are you so trusting? i mean, it’s usually trusting people end up hating the idea of trust, cause basicly, there are just too many jerks on planet earth these days. i say you don’t have to go “niether or” here: you could use your wise head with your gifted intuition, to decide should you do a particular thing with him/her; you should make such a decision every time; because when a particular thing happens to do with millions of bucks, your life long friends are likely to be at the edge of betryal.

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I don’t trust wholeheartedly- I like to take risks. I like to challenge myself, at least in my current condition of the last 6 months, to receive rewards or punishments. Neutrality is not an option- I bore of comfort. I need to strike out towards a new, more productive direction, and while doing so I expect conflict. In aspiring towards something more than what I know, I have surrendered to inevitable potential consequences.

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We need to trust. That is without question. We have to trust that drivers obey traffic lights at road junctions; that the food we had for breakfast is not contaminated; that the air we breathe have not been poisoned by some act of terrorism the night before; that the other parties will deliver their goods at the office today as they have agreed in the contract, for they too trust that the law will be effective should they not perform, etc etc.

Almost every act of living and habit is enmeshed in a web of trust, and these will be reduced to foolishness should there be a broken link in these chains of trusts.

There are certain things we can choose whether we trust or not, such as the stranger you just met on the street, or a long time office colleague. But we need to know how we should choose.

One is the risk of trusting: what is the cost of becoming vulnerable to another? what is the damage to me should there be a breach of trust? Or perhaps my vulnerability will induce the other to be similarly vulnerable too, and so we becoming mutual dependent in mutual vulnerability. Or perhaps I can hedge my risks by exploiting some leverage that I may have over the other.

Another is the value resulting from the trust. So can have a concept of an optimum point between benefits and risks as a basis for choosing to trust or not. But I do not know if such a concept is realistically doable, ie that we can actually locate that optimal point between risks and benefits. But we certainly can reason about them, or not and instead based solely on feelings.

But then there are things that we trust without a choice. For example when we are babies we are completely vulnerable to our parents, utterly dependent on them to feed and to protect us. We are literally at their mercies. But then parents naturally love their children, mostly. We also cannot choose, without becoming absurd, not to breathe the air around us, nor to not walk on the ground lest the earth opens up to swallow us.

There are also trusting relationships that we enter into without being aware that they are such: we behave as if there is trust, but actually it is just a habit or custom or similarity to other trusted situations. Money is an example: you will take my twenty dollar bill as payment without hesitation or thinking that it may be worthless tomorrow. Another is that behind every email or posting here is a real flesh and blood human being. And of course stepping the gas when the light goes green is another.

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This is way I saw that trust is a leap of faith. You can trust another and another can trust you. There is never enough proof to convince the skeptic. We have to inhibit the skeptical impulse and allow ourselves to just trust. Is anybody perfectly trustworthy? No. Those whom we trust can hurt us. Those whom we trust often hurt us the worst. We are all imperfect. Nobody is 100% trustworthy, yet trusting other people is still vital.

We can risk a little pain and trust people or we can assure ourselves of a constant stream of mild pain from solitude and loneliness. When we trust then we risk, but risking is essential to thriving, instead of merely surviving.

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It is a leap of faith and it’s not to say that I haven’t taken that leap. Love will make you do it, that’s for sure. I’m just bitter and betrayed- I’ve lost my innocence in some ways and in other ways not- I’m still a dreamer and always will be.

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Betrayal is a hell of a wound. I think that Dante was astute and insightful when he assigned betrayers to the deepest levels of damnation.

I think dreamers get hurt the worst sometimes because their intense hopes carry them so very high up before something shitty brings them crashing back down. Its a heavy price to pay to be a dreamer.